Rick Holmes: Marriage on the rocks

Monday

Feb 27, 2012 at 12:01 AMFeb 27, 2012 at 2:16 AM

In their zeal to defend marriage from the gays, conservatives have perpetuated a myth: that the institution of marriage is fixed and never-changing. In truth, marriage has changed much through the centuries, and it is changing again.

Rick Holmes

In their zeal to defend marriage from the gays, conservatives have perpetuated a myth: that the institution of marriage is fixed and never-changing. In truth, marriage has changed much through the centuries, and it is changing again.

Marriage in America is in a long-term decline, with a constantly shifting definition – and it has nothing to do with the gays.

In little more than a generation, the old rhyme “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage” has been rewritten. Increasingly, the babies come first. When and if romance, stability and money allow, a wedding comes later.

Like most cultural shifts, this one is written in statistics. In 1960, three-quarters of Americans were married; now it’s about half. Among Americans in their 20s, 68 percent were married in 1960; now that number is down to 26 percent.

But we’re reproducing, with or without the wedding rings. The American family has just passed a milestone, The New York Times reports: More than half of the babies born to U.S. women under 30 are now born out of wedlock.

Liberals and conservatives emphasize different reasons behind this trend: Reduced earnings for males, expanded job opportunities for females, government programs that subsidize independence and/or create dependency, a culture steeped in sex without responsibility, a decline in church attendance, the disappearance of the stigma of illegitimacy.

That last factor alone makes a big difference in the numbers. Researchers say as much as a third of marriages a half-century ago were preceded by pregnancy. Fewer shotgun weddings means more kids born out of wedlock.

There’s an education angle as well. College-educated couples are more likely to get married, and less likely to have children outside of marriage, than their less-educated peers. Maybe that’s because they’ve learned that stable families mean healthier kids and happier adults, but I doubt that’s a lesson taught in college classrooms.

Lessons about marriage and family are learned at home and in the neighborhood. People whose parents divorced when they were young — divorces spiked in America in the ’70s and ‘80s — are more likely to be both skeptical about the promise of marriage and reluctant to commit to one.

Class comes into play as well. Single-parent families struggle economically. Children in such homes grow up in neighborhoods where successful two-parent families are less the rule than the exception. Those patterns repeat themselves generation after generation.

Charles Murray, a well-known conservative scholar, hits the class issue in his new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” Murray finds that the virtuous working class whites who made up Nixon’s “silent majority” and became Reagan Democrats, are no longer virtuous and hard-working. They’ve lost their jobs and are increasingly dependent on government. They no longer go to church, they don’t marry and their illegitimacy rates now mirror that of the black underclass earlier generations of social scientists fretted about.

For today’s young couples, marriage has become an aspiration, a romantic ideal, to be celebrated at weddings that grow more extravagant by the year. Marriage is no longer an economic necessity; women with decent jobs and government help don’t need a man to take care of them and their children, especially the chronically unemployed men in their social circles.

Nor is marriage a step everyone is expected to take. As the unwed mother of two told the Times:

“I’d like to do it, but I just don’t see it happening right now,” she said. “Most of my friends say it’s just a piece of paper, and it doesn’t work out anyway.”

Meanwhile, there’s no debate over the impact single-parenthood has on children. Of course there are exceptions — terrific, well-adjusted kids coming from wonderful one-parent families. But study after study has shown the children who grow up in single-parent families are more likely to suffer economic hardship, to struggle in school, to get in trouble with the law and to have difficulty forming stable relationships later in life.

Government policies have a role in the changing American family, including no-fault divorce and benefits programs that reduce subsidies if the child’s father moves into the household. But no politician can bring back the Ozzie-and-Harriet model of 50 years ago. Large economic and cultural forces have shaped families for centuries, dwarfing government interventions.

Marriage and unwed parenthood are complicated, difficult issues that deserve more serious discussion than they get. But while this has been happening, and particularly as the trend has gotten more pronounced in the last 10 years, what have the self-described defenders of marriage been doing? Instead of telling heterosexual couples why they should be getting married, they’ve focused all their energy on blocking gay couples from the altar.

I find that maddening and tragic. America and America’s children need more good marriages and more stable families of all types. Stopping loving couples from marrying is not the way to strengthen marriage.

Rick Holmes, opinion editor for the Daily News, blogs at Holmes & Co. (http://blogs.wickedlocal.com/holmesandco). He can be reached at rholmes@wickedlocal.com.

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